Courses : Accelerating Business Process Engineering and Systems
Development with Reusable Business Knowledge : Syllabus
ENTR/MAP 459/559
Accelerating Business Process Engineering
and Systems Development with Reusable Business Knowledge
Instructor: Amit
Mitra (& Amar Gupta,
Ph.D)
Date/Time: MW 09:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location: McClelland Hall 405SS
Semester: Spring 2006; March 5 to May 5, 2006
Objective and rationale:
The objective of the course is to introduce a new
paradigm that addresses business agility, process resilience, and
leveraging of corporate knowledge. The course will demonstrate how
business knowledge can be reused to attain major strategic benefits
through decomposition of knowledge into components. It will show
how these components of knowledge can be reconfigured in step with
innovation and new learning, and how business processes and information
systems can be designed to automatically flex in step with the evolving
configurations of knowledge in support of business agility.
Agility is becoming the most important challenge
for the long-term success of businesses. However, most business
process engineering, outsourcing, and information systems approaches
discount innovation and agility. They only address issues of operational
efficiency and economics. Agility is becoming increasingly critical
because of the unprecedented rate of change and innovation that
characterizes the twenty first century. The slow, methodically structured
manufacturing and mass production paradigms of the industrial age
are crumbling under the onslaught of information bolstered by new
knowledge. The physical products of the industrial age were fixed,
structured and stable; they were developed to fulfill a stable need.
Knowledge and information are not only chimerical and unstructured,
but they have extended the reach of businesses to cover the entire
globe. This has made businesses bigger, more diverse and more complex
by quantum leaps, and more prone to chaos under the imperatives
of rapid change. Competition has intensified.
Customer satisfaction and customer share have gained
paramount importance. For these reasons, one needs to study new
approaches that facilitate the automated synthesis and coordination
of business knowledge is beginning to have a profound impact on
the way business is being done
The course will describe how information systems
can be designed to better adapt to changing operational needs and
market conditions. This is accomplished partially by reusing and
re-configuring business knowledge. In addition, the principal instructor
will highlight how innovation and flexibility of product-service
offerings, business processes and information systems can be supported
with component technology. These components will not be traditional
I/T components. Rather they will be shared components of knowledge
from which patterns of business knowledge can be assembled. These
components will be the cornerstone of a new computing paradigm in
which computers manipulate meanings, not program code or blind symbols.
Systems built on these principles will operate on the plane of meanings
- a little like we, humans, do.
Additional details about the new course will be
added to the same website on a continuing basis during the spring
term.
Target Audience:
This course connects business knowledge with process and
systems engineering. It will address both business process and information
architecture. For this reason it will be relevant to students of Management,
ECE, SIE and Computer Science. It is open both to graduate and undergraduate
students. Among undergraduates, this course is appropriate for students
who are juniors or seniors. All students, irrespective of their department/program,
should be able to register for the course on an online basis.
Each student will be required to write a paper
on an issue/aspect related to the topic and its practical application
in speeding the process engineering, product design or systems development
life cycle.
Students are required to secure prior approval
of the topic of the paper by contacting the instructor for this
course via email. The paper will be developed incrementally in two
drafts. The first draft will be expected at the end of the first
month. The second draft will be a refinement and extension of the
first draft. It will be expected at the end of the course. The course
grade will be based primarily on this paper, and partially on class
attendance and participation. Graduate students and honors students
will be required to submit an additional interim paper during the
middle of the semester.
Grading:
Undergraduate
80% - Final Paper
20% - Class attendance and Participation
Graduate
30% - Mid-term Paper
50% - Final Paper
20% - Class attendance and Participation
Books:
The course will rely heavily on the two new books highlighted at:
http://next.eller.arizona.edu/books/
For more information, please contact
us.
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